Battery recycling standard in works for Ontario

Two of Ontario’s largest waste management organization are working together to develop an end-of-life single-use battery recycling standard that will include definitions and a method for calculating battery recycling efficiency.

April 14, 2014
by Solid Waste & Recycling

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Two of Ontario’s largest waste management organization are working together to develop an end-of-life single-use battery recycling standard that will include definitions and a method for calculating battery recycling efficiency.

Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO)announced at its March 2014 Board of Directors meeting that it will be working with the Recycling Council of Ontario (RCO) to develop one consistent end-of-life standard for single-use batteries.

“In consultation with stakeholders, RCO will use a transparent process to complete the review by the end of September 2014,” WDO said in a statement released April 9, 2014.

The development of the battery standards comes as WDO considers an application from Call2Recycle Canada, which has proposed to be the provincial steward for battery recycling, the middle-man between battery manufacturers and consumers. WDO will make a decision on the proposal by June 18, 2014. In the meantime, it must consider questions around competition and the proposal’s potential effect on the battery processing marketplace, as well as the costs of the transition from the current Stewardship Ontario-operated program to a potential Call2Recycle-operated program.

WDO has been considering the battery stewardship proposal since fall 2013, but stakeholders have raised concerns over the financial impact on industry, such as Ontario’s Raw Materials Co. in Niagara, and questioned the merit of burning batteries for use as a road aggregate.

RCO’s first order of business for the battery standard will be to request relevant data from stakeholders and complete a literature review of all existing regulatory requirements and best practices for processing single-use batteries.

Stakeholders will be part of the entire process, states WDO, forming part of an advisory committee that will provide feedback throughout the development of the battery standard.